Sunday, August 04, 2013

Moonshine of the Damned, Production Journal #15.

Day Nine has come and gone - and it went really, really well. I estimated about 5 hours, plus some time to shoot some other cutaways that would allow one actor to be over and done with and another to not have to return until the very last shoot. We ended up being done 2 hours early and even after the additional shots, and doing a makeup job, still came in under an hour short of what I'd expected. I was pretty exhausted afterwards, which I usually am, but I still managed to get the scenes edited shortly after it was all done.

I've always meant to edit right after filming while it's still fresh in my mind, and for once actually did so after the last shoot - which I'm lucky happened since some shots were no good and had to be redone - so I was able to get the actor back in time before he shaved and threw out his costume. Good timing and it reminded me I should be a little more pro-active in getting this done.

I don't want to end up in the end with missing footage and a pile of work I just don't have the energy to wade through/ I started organizing all the footage by scenes tonight and I'm going to attempt to get some major editing done - there's only maybe half of what's shot so far that hasn't been edited, so it's not too bad just yet.

So here was our cast for the day, we had just enough zombie heads on sticks to go around for the picture.

I've been fortunate up until this shoot to have had nothing but smaller shoots with only a couple actors (aside from the opening stuff) and today was our first return to that and the next few shoots are more or less the same. Hoping to get it all scheduled so we're done early to mid-September, we'll see how that all goes.

The biggest snag we had was one of the actors, John MacDonald, had shaved his head - I meant to remind him a week or so before the shoot and didn't and literally 2 days before this shoot he did it. Admittedly a small thing, but just one of those things you can't get around - unless you have the opportunity to have him put on a hat.

Normally, this would feel like it was added and forced, but we had a really good spot to put it in without slowing things down or causing things to feel too out of sorts. Most might not even notice we did it on purpose

We even got to hose someone down with blood today. We had another Zombie Eater appearance that left him a little bloody - possibly causing some continuity issues if you don't believe he'd clean himself up. I might go back and use some other footage or even reshoot a couple closeups later if I don't think I can live with it.

The biggest issue of the day was once we got the prosthetic on for this sequence, I noticed there was a huge tear in the back on the neck, luckily it just meant we could only shoot him from one side so it was unnoticeable and upon examining it when I got home I noticed it was the one place on the inside I hadn't reinforced with latex. So I'm hoping it'll last for the very final shoot so I don't have to make another one.

And today was Ancelene's last day, as well as Mark's. We ended up shooting a little extra into another scene to take care of them.

Overall I think it turned out alright, not perfect - but these things rarely are. When you're shooting something like a sledgehammer to the face it's hard to have it turn out exactly like you thought it would, we got it covered well enough though that with some sound it should work.

And since it was Ancelene's last day there was a couple minor shots I needed to get and redo to fill in some gaps. One didn't quite turn out like I'd planned, but I'm going to see if I can rework it without having to reshoot it again.

And then came the sledgehammer to the face. This was actually in the original script and when it came time for the rewrite I made to to keep it even though it happens completely differently than before - even a different character hitting her.

The worse part of this was keeping the piece on until we were ready to shoot. The hammer, with only part of the handle, was glued to the prosthetic after a quick paint job and finally glue to Ancelene's face, so she had to wander around with only one eye, holding up the sledgehammer so it wouldn't pull the makeup off. And rather than go all the way back to the location, I brought some of the location to us - just a pile of leaves since the ground where we're shooting is littered with them.

And that's it. Another day over and done with, everything pretty much turned out as expected. Got a shoot next weekend as well that should be interesting and I'm seeing if I can shoot a little more to get around some scheduling issues that might cause more delays.